fantasyfantasygames

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No Blood for the Wicked

No Blood for the Wicked, Fangs First Productions, 2020

In the... um... the vein of... um... you know I was not expecting to make that pun this early, sorry... Fuck it I'm rolling with it. In the vein of such games as Eat the Reich, you are playing vampires who kill bad guys. Specifically, in this case, cultists. They want peoples' blood for sacrifices to their evil god. They cannot have it. That blood is yours.

I sort of think that NBftW started as a Night's Black Agents hack. The "decide what kind of vampires are involved" stage early on covers a lot of the same ground. In the same way that Night's Black Agents has an Investigation / Other skill split, there's a stark split here between types of abilities that can be used against other vampires directly and those that cannot. That this game started as a hack is not a bad thing! Hell, nearly every game out there started off as a hack of a different game, and Night's Black Agents itself is a Gumshoe variant, and Gumshoe is etc. etc.. I just wanted to point out some some of NBftW's lineage.

Also, no, I will not abbreviate Night's Black Agents. I cannot read that as anything but National Basketball Association.

NBftW has some very atmospheric art. About half of each piece is solid black, which actually works great. Hands with claws reaching out of the dark to drag a vampire back into it. Eyes in the dark, staring down at a terrified bloodsucker in a dark alley. Wild, dark hair around a wild-eyed face. It really gets across the feeling that you're playing the scarier monsters in the game.

The mechanics are Gumshoe with extra fiddly bits. You roll d6 plus points you spend from your abilities, target number 4 plus difficulty. This game uses equivalents of the "Thriller Combat Rules" and "Thriller Chases" rules from Night's Black Agents, and expands those to what one might call "Thriller Stealth" and "Thriller Psychic Battle". They're all defaults instead of options. Instead of Gumshoe's investigation rules, where you are famously unable to not find clues, you are unable to not find vampires. NBftW could stand to bring some of the stylish and minimalist approach it took in its artwork to its game design.

I really enjoy evil-fighting-evil games, and NBftW hits that directly for me. I think the reason it didn't take off more is that it was distributed from a black-background website with text colored #230000, which is a blood red that's damn near black. And they didn't let you select the text to see it easier. Even if you came across the game you'd need to read the page source to buy it. Why they didn't just put it on an existing site I have no idea, but I guess they wanted to do the opposite of stress-testing their e-commerce system.

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One Hundred Wizards

One Hundred Wizards, 60th Level Orc, 2024

What might sound like a dime-a-dozen D&D5e supplement is actually an OSR game with a unique concept. All your characters are wizards, but each of you has a very specific and flavorful spell list.

The system is more or less basic D&D with some modern improvements. It's the usual six stats, AC and saves that go upward, BAB instead of THAC0, Fort/Ref/Will saves as per 4e, "got 'em or you don't" skills that give a +4 bonus, but a stripped-down combat system that's very "theater of the mind". Nothing particularly special here.

The interesting part is the classes. There are 30 different spellcaster classes. That's it. No fighter or thief. Well, some of the casters are very beefy or particularly sneaky, but everyone's casting spells.

So how about them spells? If your game is all wizards, you better have good spells.

No one gets less than three or more than a dozen. I think there's a strict word count limit on the lists, with two exceptions (the Diabolist and the Stargazer, who apparently need more guardrails).

A few of the spells match up with standard D&D stuff, especially the weirder ones. There's a Horse-Mage who effectively has Mount, Find Familiar, Animal Friendship, etc. There's a Mage of the Broken Mind with spells that line up with Hideous Laughter, Confusion, and Hypnotic Pattern (among others).

All spells are unique. No two classes share a spell.

A lot of them have names attached, like Radiment's Unyielding Windstorm or Endeleshe's Sacred Communion.

There are a small number I recognize from the List of Spells Not Worth Memorizing.

Most classes are not actually focused on a specific set of effects. They're more focused on specific ways to cast magic, like sound, gestures, rituals, or alchemy. Others seem to have a list of "This is what our ancestors found useful for the place we live." The Cliffside Magi, the Sorcerers of Sail, Those Who Climb To The Moon, the Mage (singular) of the Moving Island, and several others fall into that category. If you live on a cliffside, then spells that let you climb quickly, move things up and down, ignore wind, and speak with birds of prey become a pretty sensible set.

Ways to detect magic are likewise unique. I haven't seen a game before where one mage class has to watch patterns of carefully gathered colored sand in order to see magic, and another always sees magic even with their eyes closed. Some of them don't have any "Detect Magic" equivalent at all, and just have to guess.

Intentionally-written side effects are rare, but unfortunate implications are common. See also "you see magic with your eyes closed", which probably makes it hard to get to sleep.

There's a 5e-style concentration mechanic, but otherwise no limit on how many spells you can cast per day or have active at once.

The art is the weak point. It's sparse and generic. I think I recognize a few from stock art packs on DriveThru and Itch. Layout is mediocre. Honestly, attempting to provide character-specific art for each of 30 wizard classes would be kind of a challenge.

And yes, I know, they promised 100 but only delivered 30. There's no explanation of why the title is what it is. If anyone finds out who 60th Level Orc is, please ask them for me. I'd still play this in a second.

[fantasyfantasygames]

Best Defense

Best Defense, Jackyl, 2023

Best Defense is a three-setting, one-rules game with a focus on overwhelmed defenders holding the line against an invading army.

The rules downplay individual prowess in battle and individual injuries. You're playing soldiers (willing or not) who are gathered tightly together and relying on each other constantly, rather than snipers or pilots who are more on their own taking out chosen targets. Your attributes include Morale, Courage, and Health (which is not HP), rather than the usual Str/Dex/Con. You make a lot of shared or aided rolls and fewer solo ones. Wounds are simple but debilitating - you're not going to be rushed back into the action. Disease and poison gas work similarly. The group is encouraged to have more characters than players, so that new characters take the limelight when others are injured.

The settings are fairly standard fantasy, modern-day, and near-future sci-fi. Each of them has a twist that doesn't take them too far away from a baseline ground war. In the fantasy setting, you're all serving under the dragon-generals who rule each nation. The modern-day setting uses fake country names like you'd see in DC or Marvel (Latveria, Bialya, etc.) rather than real-world countries. The fantasy one is just past cyberpunk, with Terminator-style evil machines as your enemies.

Long-term game play in Best Defense is a bit of a painful prospect. Either you chew through characters to keep your position, or you play it safe and lose ground. It's probably better run as a one-shot at a convention.

The art in Best Defense is pretty heavily weighted toward the modern-era setting. It's slightly anime. There were some accusations of AI use, with the artist saying "No I just can't draw hands." Proportions in foreground / background are a bit off as well. Make your own judgments there. I think it might have helped to have more art of the fantasy and sci-fi settings, as right now they feel kind of vestigial.

I like that Best Defense focuses on the people who are up against it and who have to stand together. Too many war-oriented games focus on individuals. To that end, I would have liked to see some more mechanical focus on the connections between characters. Something that's quick to set up and use, so that the character turnover feels poignant rather than rushed. The game considers this a "fruitful void" area, and says so in the GM section, but I don't see it really bearing that much fruit.

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TECHNOLOGIC

TECHNOLOGIC, d4ffft, 2018

People will license the oddest things.

TECHNOLOGIC (capitals mandatory) is an RPG based on the work of Daft Punk. It's a cyberware game, but not cyberpunk, despite the name of the band. Your characters have quit their grinding day-to-day office or factory jobs, and are now traveling through a slightly trippy, slightly eccentric world to find meaning in their lives.

Attributes are, of course, Harder, Better, Faster, and Stronger. The last two are self-explanatory. Harder is the social attribute, and Better is the mental one.

Skills are taken from the title track, as it were. There's Buy It (wealth), Fix It (repair), Print It (crafting via 3d printers), Leave It (running), Pause It (for distracting people from what they're doing), Work It (sex appeal), etc. Some of them are overly broad, like Use It, which applies to almost all tech in a tech-heavy game, or overly narrow, like Jam-Unlock It in a game with no breakdown rules.

The game engine is very matrix-driven. It's actually pretty reminiscent of the FASERIP success table, if you're familiar with that. You roll, cross-index your stat and your opponent's stat, and end up with a colored result. From best to worst, the results are Fuchsia, Magenta, Indigo, Azure, Teal, and Lime. The first table might get you your final result, or it might tell you to roll on a second table. That might or might not send you to a third table. You get a handful of Get Lucky points, which can move you up to +3 shifts on your color result. The game has a mild "death spiral" (not that combat is a big part of the game), and penalties you pick up from Indigo or Azure successes slowly mean that you get a Fuchsia result and are out of the action.

I gave it a dozen or so rolls, and it seemed to work fine, but I feel like it's too much. It takes too long to resolve, and it takes too many rolls to get the final outcome. You could get the same results with a single, much simpler table and a d100 roll, or maybe contested d20 rolls and using the difference to determine success.

As the game progresses you pick up "Fragments of Time", which are moments that are particularly meaningful to your character. These serve multiple purposes:

They provide roleplaying fodder for how your character should act toward and react to other people.

They provide you a set of Get Lucky points that you can use in situations related to those specific moments

Adding or removing a Fragment gives you XP to spend.

That's probably my favorite part of the game. Those of you who have heard me wax rhapsodic about Tenra Bansho Zero and its marvelous character development mechanics probably guessed that already. (Seriously, read TBZ, the Kiai / Aiki / Fates / Karma loop is my favorite.)

Sadly, the book contains no art. The layout is decent, but apparently while d4ffft got permission to use lyrics and song titles they didn't manage to secure the rights to any imagery and decided to just go to press without it (which, fair). This is one of the few books I feel like could benefit from some early 2000s Poser art. It just feels like the exact right venue for it, you know? Put in some badly rendered metallic scenery with an overly-smooth facsimile of a human being.

@chubbycrowgames made a quick random character generator, so if you do happen to pick up TECHNOLOGIC there's some existing support for it.

[fantasyfantasygames]

My games are out!

Breaking the usual tone of the blog - my games are now available at Indie Press Revolution! If you want to read the stuff I write when I actually put together an RPG for real, this is where you can get the high-quality print copies.

Sufficiently Advanced

Sorcerously Advanced

Monster Ambulance

Many thanks to the nice folks at @indiepressrevolution for helping me make them widely available.

[fantasyfantasygames]

Sorcerer Cats

Sorcerer Cats, Magicat1666, 2017

The Warriors novel series, perhaps better known among middle-schoolers of a certain age as Warrior Cats, was extremely popular in the mid 2010s. So naturally someone wanted to cash in. I'd call it an homage or a tribute or say that it "pulled inspiration from," but no, it's a hack job. Sorcerer Cats was written by someone with no idea what Warriors was about. The clan names are almost the same, the locations are knockoffs,

First off, the characters in Sorcerer Cats are humanoid.

I know, right? Like, I don't feel like I need a "next off" after that.

Let's just get into the rules part. Sorcerer Cats is a bit OSR - it has the standard six attributes, levels, HP. It simplifies all saves to a 50-50 shot. No attack roll, just a "damage save". Combat works basically the same.

Instead of OD&D's usual four classes, we have Sorcerer (Wizard), Templar (Cleric), Songblade (Elf) (Elf was the warrior-mage half-caster class back in the day), and Treewalker (Druid). An unpublished supplement was to add a half-caster Cleric and a necromancer, where they totally fumbled the chance to use the word "Nekomancer" (thank you, Monstress).

The spells themselves are reskinned OD&D spells. Haste is Ferocious Agility, Detect Invisible becomes Scent of the Unseen, Speak with Plants becomes Hear the Wild, the cure-type spells require grooming, etc. Fireball, Lightning Bolt, and a few others are identical. There's no Light spell because you are cats and you can see in the dark.

Your characters explicitly have some cat-like abilities and drawbacks. You can leap very high. You get a bonus to stealthy actions, but if you're caught it's assumed that you forgot to hide your tail. This is accurate to life, can confirm. You get some minor bonuses based on your "race", like Maine Coon or Stripey.

...you know, I do sort of wonder whether Magicat1666 went into this with a more sincere homage, got a bunch of art where the artist Didn't Understand The Assignment™, and rebuilt the game the best they could around it. The art is very well-done, in a quite professional painterly style. It doesn't have any of the... for lack a better word, "bite" of the Warriors novel series. If I ended up with some really beautiful art for a game that I had different ideas for, and I couldn't just request a re-do, I might make this kind of change myself.

I was sadly too old to be in on the Warrior Cats craze, but what I'd really like to see is a heartfelt take on the "Young Wizards" series spinoff about magical cats. Diane Duane does a fantastic job with non-human characters (Mr. Athendë! K's't'lk!) and The Book of Night with Moon is just dripping with fun stuff to play around with.

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Combo review: The Dark Room and Pitch-Black Time Machine

The Dark Room / Pitch-Black Time Machine, Rob Knight, 2016/2018

In 2016, Rob Knight released a thoughtful, investigative RPG entitled The Dark Room (TDR). In 2018 he released an extremely different game entitled Pitch-Black Time Machine (PBTM), using the exact same rules word-for-word. I figured I'd review both of them in one post.

In TDR each of your characters have walked into the titular room and found themselves with each other, despite entering the room in different years. When you exit the room, you're at one person's era. You try to resolve someone's issues (external and internal), and then walk back into the room and do it again in someone else's era. Once everyone's issues are solved, people can finally go back to their own eras. The mystery of the room's how and why is never resolved.

PBTM, on the other hand, is a party horror. Your inebriated characters cram themselves into a darkened closet on a combination of "seven minutes in heaven" and a phone booth stunt. When they tumble back out it's into a weirdly fractured universe where one of their issues has gone rampant, causing horrible trouble for everyone. Every time they confront one successfully, the world rearranges, until they finally end up in a world better than they left it and burn down the house with the closet. Tone-wise it's a mix of Buffy and Harold & Kumar.

There are three "layers" to the rules, and to the characters you build with them. The Issues layer deals with problems in the character's lives. It's the most innovative part of the system. Rather than just a description or a rating, Issues have mechanical hooks that let the GM generate opposition dice pools and relevant NPCs. They also provide the PCs with tainted bonuses, building negative effects even as they provide dice Success doesn't erase Issues, but instead transmutes them, turning down the negative side effects, healing weakness and building resilience.

Talents and Statistics provide more standard systems. You could run the game with just Issues, but Talents provide your character's background and anything that would fall under Advantages and Disadvantages in GURPS. Statistics provide the usual six modern attributes (str/agi/sta/int/cha/per) on a 20-80 rating and some percentile skills. The Statistics layer is either extremely phoned in, or is a reasonable case of whipping up a generic system when you don't need anything more complex. Honestly, you could run a game without the Issues layer and have a very typical older modern-era game, but that would be like using Unknown Armies without the shock gauges or Rolemaster with no crit tables. Issues are what make this system sing.

Overall I'm impressed by the difference in tone between the two games despite using the exact same system. The art does a lot to help reinforce that. Both are black and white line art, but TDR is thin-lined historical sketches and PBTM is thicker-lined and more cartooney, kind of caricature-ish. (I talk art good.) A little research revealed that it's the same artist at different points in their career, and pre/post transition, which is kinda cool. Even without the art, the text really conveys a very different game, and Rob did a great job finding two settings that precisely fit the same set of rules.

x

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It's Moon O'Clock

It's Moon O'Clock, Lightfoot, 2023

After a number of heavier games (in rules or in feel), It's Moon O'Clock feels breezy and relaxing, and we need that sometimes.

It's Moon O'Clock (IMOC) is a GMless game about a trip to the moon and back. It's intended for a rich-text, slow-paced environment: a forum, a wiki, texting, maybe Discord. Anywhere you can put both text and media. You could do it in person, but you'd need computers or access to a fairly good library, and a willingness to wait while someone finds the perfect image.

You take turns posting a piece of media that relates to your trip. Players are encouraged to be fanciful and open-minded. Apollo mission footage, Space Shuttle photos, conceptual drawings of lunar cities, animations of aliens, Moon-Men from Rocky & Bullwinkle, basically anything is ok. Everyone else builds a little story around it based on their characteristics.

The game includes a sample of play that feels, well, playful. The players are clearly having a good time, and the characters generally are too. There are nice little moments of interest and awe. One of the players really likes real-world space travel and is using Gemini footage; another is putting up moon sketches his kid made. It's cute.

The characteristics mentioned above are short answers to a few basic questions, including: What do you need? What are you afraid of? and What do you love that you want to help other people love? Each one has a d66 table of options if you're not feeling inspired. By the time you leave the moon the other players should know your answers to those questions. The book does note that "to see the moon" is a bad answer for "What do you need?" because, uh, that happens, guaranteed, it's literally moon o'clock.

My only complaint about the game is a minor writing gripe - I hate it when someone refers to a character as a player. If you want to have vague language, or use PC a lot, that's fine, but don't refer to my avatar / representative within the game as a "player". I am the player. I am not playing a player. Other than that, the writing is fairly good.

If you have a dispersed friend group that might enjoy making imaginary stories together, IMOC is definitely worth checking out as a framework.

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Body Disposal Service

Knock Knock It's The Body Disposal Service, Sticky Wick Games, 2020

In various ultraviolent movies (John Wick, let's say) there's a company that you can call that will come into your building of choice, remove dead bodies, deep-clean the blood out of the carpets and walls, wipe off fingerprints, spackle over bullet holes, and leave essentially no evidence that extreme amounts of murder ever happened.

These are their stories.

Characters in Body Disposal Service (BDS) are primarily defined by background and skills, like a lot of other games. However, the backgrounds in this case are the kinds of crimes you used to do, and the skills are extremely specific construction, housekeeping, and maintenance skills. Backgrounds include Sniper, Strangler, Poisoner, and other varieties of assassin. Each comes with a few descriptors, like "shadowy" or "well-muscled". Skills include things like Rug Shampooing, Masonry, and Drywall Repair. You always have a core skill very high, one that you're ok at, and... welllll, technically you can do any job but you're going to need help.

There's a fairly limited set of scenarios one can have in a game like BDS. All of them revolve around who might interrupt you in the middle of your work. (There are no rules for getting to/from the site, you just start there.) You might be interrupted by the cops, by housekeeping, by more assassins coming back to finish the job, or even by a rival team of cleaners, but that's about it.

I feel like BDS would be better off as an indie video game or a board game. I can imagine some dexterity elements for cleaning, hidden-picture games to track down all the fingerprints, and timing puzzles to keep it stealthy. As an RPG, though, it doesn't feel like it would work for more than about two hours. There's a whole "write your feelings about the other characters" part of chargen that will probably just never come up, because even the examples in the book are outside the scope of the story. Another "fun at a con" game. It's only 24 pages, so that seems ok.

If Sticky Wick Games (...ew) wanted to enable longer-form play, they should provide some options for connected stories that happen over the course of several cleanups. Are they being hired by the same person for ever-more-innocent targets? Is there a mystery whose clues they find as they go along? Obviously I can come up with some of that on my own, but a few more pages of support would go a long way here.

[fantasyfantasygames]

How To Win The Next Election

How To Win The Next Election, Full Court Marathon Games, 2024

Originally written in 2016, How To Win The Next Election (HTWTNE) was revised recently and reissued. Unlike a lot of RPGs, it's one with distinct winners and losers at the end. Your characters are people involved in the political process of a large nation, trying to ensure that your allies and land are protected.

Stats are focused on mental and social, and are also alphabetized: Artistry, Bravado, Charisma, Deviousness, and Earnings (a wealth score). The only physical stat is that there's a Fatigue score that can be improved if you get exercise (and other factors). Skills are fairly broad, and include Writing, Speaking, Design, Technology, Negotiation, etc. There are no official "playbooks", but there are a few templates you can use, like Organizer, Protester, Webmaster, The Face, etc. Stats are determined semi-randomly In general no one's going to be able to do it all themselves. Having your team work together is key, and even someone with really low stats can contribute. Connecting with other groups in-game is vital as well.

The game is designed explicitly for "campaign" play (ha). No one-shots here; the rules just don't work on a scale that small. Each session your team works on something specific: phone banking, flyering, fundraising, tough conversations, etc. In the long run, it's all about accumulating bonuses to your Turnout score. HTWTNE is unique in that allies from other play groups can also give you a bonus! Those bonuses fade over time at a somewhat random rate - some of them stick around for multiple sessions, helping you build momentum, but sometimes the game's randomized "news cycle" punts you off the public awareness. Your mid-game Turnout can also help you recruit new allies.

It's possible to put your team into a "walking dead" situation where you haven't taken advantage of the bonuses available early on, or haven't made enough alliances. Luckily there are a lot of "walkthroughs" online (weird for a niche TTRPG, I know) that can help you avoid that. There are even groups who play this game more or less continuously, though you'll probably want to dip in and out. Your Fatigue score recovers over the course of real time rather than game sessions.

HTWTNE can definitely feel unfair at times. I won my first playthrough and lost my second, and both were really down to the wire. Some of what I did mattered; some didn't. I can't say that I loved playing it, but I know I'll be playing again pretty soon.

Full Court Marathon Games (motto: It's Not A Race) doesn't put out a lot of products, but the ones they make are pretty compelling. I encourage you to try it out.

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Deep Space Kegger

Deep Space Kegger, Deep Drive Press, 2015

Deep Space Kegger (DSK) is more of a mood than a game. It is a working game, but it's not trying to do anything innovative with its mechanics or construct allegories in its setting. It's trying to give you a feeling.

And that feeling is PARTYYYYYYYY!

You make a character by rolling 16d6 and assigning them to the 16 ability scores as you see fit. They include things like Body, Body Language, Hack and Slash, Hack and Infiltrate, and other semi-amusing pairings. There are no skills or other kinds of stats except your Goal (see below). You get that many tokens in each thing, and you spend them to do stuff. You are encouraged to weasel your way into using stats for things they weren't intended for, or, if you can't justify that even to yourself, you should figure out a different way to get at your goal. I appreciate that your stats really give you a good idea of how your character acts.

Unlike most games that use tokens, this one encourages you to use edible tokens like chips or pretzels. In fact, you are explicitly encouraged to eat other peoples' tokens if they get in your way. You can get people to help you by breaking one of your tokens and giving part to them as a snack. I do think that 16d6 tokens is too hard to keep on your table and maybe too many things to eat in one sitting, so you'll want to track some of it with pencil and paper.

Your big thing is your Goal. You don't choose this; you roll on a d66 table. You brought your rocket or starship or escape pod or space whale to the Deep Space Kegger for a reason, and dammit you're going to make that happen. You might be here to get drunk, or get laid, or steal fuel for your ship, or take selfies with absolutely everyone, or a whole range of other things. The GM's job is to make it reasonably difficult for you. There's some brief but good guidance for the GM on how to make someone feel like they're working for something without making it feel like a slog, and how to negotiate a "fun fail" instead of "failing at fun".

DSK is definitely intended for one-shots, and would maybe honestly work better as a LARP. It's much too character-driven to be a board game. I was handed a very cheeto-stained couple pages that survived from a con game, and I'm not sure where to get it other than directly from someone who works at Deep Drive.

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Post-Literate

Post-Literate, Pictogram Games, 2011

Post-Literate takes on one of my favorite genres, transhumanism. I think it's the only transhuman game in which your characters are all illiterate.

They're not idiots, reading just stopped being necessary. Artificial intelligence (like, real AI, not the limited kind that's impacting every industry like a bomb right now) is ubiquitous and powerful, and humans rely on it for basically everything. You want to know something, just ask the open air - there's probably an AI nearby who can reply. If icons and warning signs don't make things obvious, they clearly weren't designed well enough. People who can read in this society are like someone in the modern day living "off the grid".

It's not a post-scarcity world, though. No replicators, no unlimited resources, no free energy, just so much computing power no one can run out of it. Biotech, nanotech, and computation are all massively advanced, but each of them has limits: bio is big and powerful but slow, nano is quick and precise but small-scale, and computation can't affect the real world without the other two.

The game has two typical modes of play. The first is more exploratory - what do humans do in a world where machines can do everything? The second posits a group of rogue AIs who consider humanity a drain on the world's resources, as opposed to the vast majority who are programmed to preserve humanity. You get caught up in the rogues' plots, either as a pawn of one side or the other (AIs do find humans so very hard to read), or as an ally.

Mechanically, the game essentially runs on Fate with PbtA playbooks. I'm sure plenty of other folks have done it. Given the publication date, though, the current batch of Fate stuff wasn't out yet, so this is focused around the then-newly-released Strands of Fate implementation. Definitely crunchier than one would expect from a Fate game.

The game could use more examples - a lot of examples - for aspects, stunts, and so forth. For example, the game says "use this wealth system to represent your connections with other people", but then... that's it. I can figure it out, but I'm also the GM who's read over hundred games.

Much as I love the concept of the game, I think it just didn't lean hard enough into the feel of the game - which is a shame, because that's exactly what Fate games have to do. There should be systems for mind games against AI opponents, fast-talking people into giving you access to their systems, parkour chase scenes... and you can do that, because it's Strands of Fate and it'll handle it just fine, but it's not built for it. It's too generic.

Art, including the cover, is black-and-white line drawings in a very cyberpunk style. To their credit there are almost no robots (as an AI why would you bother with running a drone 99 days out of 100?), but the tech depicted seems a bit understated for what the game describes.

Pictogram Games made Post-Literate and another game about using symbols for magic. It had the most breakable and least handicapped-accessible magic system I've seen in a long time, so buckle in for that one when I get to it.

[fantasyfantasygames]

The Fall of the House of Crusher

The Fall of the House of Crusher, Wild World Entertainment, 2018

No connection to Wesley or Beverly.

I have been very happy in the past decade to see more and more games that get outside the traditional RPG box. I like fantasy adventures and sci-fi merchant ventures and maybe some modern fantasy, but we have a lot of that. So when other kinds of games come along, even if I wouldn't play them myself, I'm always intrigued.

The Fall of the House of Crusher (FoHoC, pronounced like faux-hawk) is a drama that follows a pro wrestler and his family as events unfold and unravel in their lives. The eponymous Crusher has been a heel for years, both in the ring and out. His wife is cheating on him with his best friend and he knows but hasn't called them on it yet. His daughter, "Generation", also a wrestler, is infatuated with a new wrestler who's a face in the ring, but Crusher knows he's an asshole outside it. You pick up the pre-gens and make a few tweaks (including gender options). Then play what is assumed to be a three-part game, whether that's three acts in one day or across multiple sessions.

One of my favorite bits is that all of your moves (this is a PbtA-type game) are both wrestling moves and emotional moves. It's not that you have to choose which version you're using - every move does both things at the same time. So the DDT dazes someone, which switches their stance to "unready", which means your next move is more likely to land. Then you can hit them with a Giant Swing, which forces them to Reset, losing any momentum they had. That can be physical, with the slam and the spin, and at the same time it can be emotional, where you stun someone with a revelation and then turn the tables on them to force them out of the argument they've been building.

Another cool piece is how you switch from playing your character to playing the crowd. When you're in the limelight, it's assumed that you have an audience. It might be a wrestling match, an argument at an outdoor restaurant, an argument at an outdoor restaurant that devolves into a wrestling match, a date at a movie theater where the other moviegoers are heckling you and it becomes a wrestling match, etc. There's a lot of assumed wrestling is what I'm saying. The mechanics only cover wrestling.

The game definitely has a good ending and a bad ending, and several mixed ones. They give short suggestions for other ways things might go, but honestly I think "the wedding" and "the divorce" cover a lot of ground.

In the end this might make a better LARP than tabletop game. The story could be condensed, the mechanics could be adjusted, you could keep the PC/audience switching for major events... I could see this running at Intercon very nicely. You just need a strict reminder that no actual wrestling moves are to be performed.

[fantasyfantasygames]

Losing Arguments

How I Keep Losing All The Arguments In My Head, Sprog Troggson, 2021

Sprog Troggson, who swears up and down that it's not a pseudonym, wrote a graduate thesis on self-talk and then went on to make it into a roleplaying game by splicing it with his webcomic.

No, wait, stick around, it's better than that makes it sound.

Losing Arguments is a slice-of-life game based around some semi-loser characters in a small city. They're not total losers, but you could see how they're not toooo far from it. You play out, as the back cover says, "day-to-day inanity plus random table insanity". You might start in the generic coffee shop, roll on the "intelligent animals" table, and have to defuse an argument between a bear and a drunk rabbit. This sounds potentially fun with the right group, but it's only part of the game.

The self-talk part comes at about halfway through the session, when there's an enforced bit of downtime. It might be staring at the ceiling before getting to sleep, or sitting down to look out the window with a coffee. You do a soliloquy in-character where you think about the places you screwed up and how things should have gone differently if only you weren't such a fuck-up. Then you play out the second half of the day, where you try to turn that into something useful.

If your soliloquy ends with you learning something, and you use that, you get +2 to your rolls in the second half. If not, well, some characters are fuck-ups. (Or, more accurately, are just not in the right mindset to take advantage of productive self-talk.)

The rest of the mechanics are fine. 2d6+modifiers, no HP just changing situations, best-of-three occasionally required for longer tasks. Your stats are your job, your hobby, something about your upbringing, and your favorite kind of music. You assign +1, +2, +3, and +4 as desired.

As you'd expect, the art is all strips, panels, characters, and in a few cases stripped characters from the webcomic. As with a lot of slice-of-life webcomics, the main characters are white, everyone seems to be 25-35, and the background scenery is sporadic. It's in the vague area of Questionable Content, Something Positive, Girls with Slingshots, and presumably also whatever US-style strip-based comics are out there that actually started in the last decade. I would love to see what Losing Arguments would be if it were based on a Webtoon-style manhwa-esque vertical-scrolling style instead. There would be the same amount of drama and potential for portal fantasy, but more speed lines and better backgrounds. Usually.

It feels like a good short-run game. Maybe too much emotional depth for a one-shot, not enough cohesion for long-run, but I'd play a few sessions of Losing Arguments.

[fantasyfantasygames]

Circles of Heaven

Circles of Heaven, Eustace Selden, 1998

Circles of Heaven (CoH) started off as a hard rebound against the Satanic Panic - by an evangelical kid. The goal was to make an RPG that would be considered holy. This... did not happen.

The author did his first writing when he was 14, which beats me by a year. Unlike me, he was raised in... well, a cult. The first version of CoH was about playing angels, but it was also full of proto-quiverfull eschatological heaven-justifies-the-means propaganda. By the time he was 17, his friends had successfully pulled him out of the cult and gotten him living with distant relatives in Tacoma. The author's changing worldview, the evolving music scene, some bootleg anime, and suggestions from the same friends - seriously, this friend group is fantastic - led to a major revision of the game. It was published locally in 1998, printed by a local shop and driven around to game stores and bookstores until they found some that would sell it.

Chargen is mostly random. You pick your Nobility and Corpus. Nobility is your rank, which doesn't let you order each other around but does apply to certain creatures. For example, Archdukes can give orders to insects; a Prince or Princess of Heaven can give orders to mammals (except humans). You get some alliterative skills related to your type of creature - Archdukes get bonuses to Clandestine, Collective, and Contaminate.

Corpus is your body, and I think it's a particularly fun part of the game. Characters in CoH are angels. They're not traditional biblical angels, because the bible is secretly the work of Satan - full of half-truths more dangerous than outright lies. Instead, they're inspired by the weirdest of monsters: adlets, nuckelavee, ouroboros, futakuchi-onna, penanggalan, and a several others. You are both a human being and your monster self at the same time. You can do things that either form could do, or even things that would need both a monster and a human in the same place at the same time, and it doesn't have to make sense to see.

You roll for your Hunt (the kind of people you're here on Earth to help or punish, gives skill bonuses), your Time (the hour each day where you have extra-special powers), your Vision (how you think the world could be made ideal, gives you more skill bonuses), and your Ruling Virtues. Oh, and your attributes. Those are done on a 5-15 scale generated from a d100 table. I did say this game was written in the early 90s.

You also roll for your equipment. Not boring mortal stuff, but for a wide variety of sacred items that you hold in potentia near you and can manifest at need. Shields of fire. Shadow citadels that can hide you overnight. Flocks of stained-glass butterflies that provide cover and distracting fascination. Daybreak, the mace made of pure sunlight. Nullblades that wield themselves and absorb bullets and magic alike. Fatehook, a crochet hook that can re-knot the fabric of the world - slow to use but flexible and devastating.

The system is mediocre. It's basically a heavily-stripped-down Rolemaster, with no critical hits or spell lists. If you can't come up with anything from Rolemaster that isn't the critical hits table, you're not alone. CoH's system sort of slid into my brain and slid right back out without making an impression.

The place the game is really lacking is art. Most of it is from early otaku who loved anime but had never taken an art class. The best of it turned out to be traced from manga. The cover was a black-and-white ouroboros on a white background, which, while still not particularly well-drawn, was at least striking on the shelf.

Eustace eventually moved on. In an interview in 2012 he said that writing the game was a cathartic experience for him, helping him understand where he came from and embrace where he was going. Once it was out, he didn't feel the need to keep writing. I hope he finds a creative spark again some day - I think a shorter version (with better art) would fit well with games like Mörk Borg and Songbirds.

[fantasyfantasygames]

Space Rampage

Space Rampage, Jack Spellington, 1997

Did you know there was going to be an Eve Online RPG at one point? That link has a thread with basically all the info you're going to get. There's a Twilight Imperium RPG if you like your games inspired by rules-heavy board games instead of rules-heavy MMOs.

Now imagine if someone decided to make a rules-heavy MMO into an RPG... that was also designed for a dozen or more players.

Space Rampage was designed for semi-competitive play at conventions, with games of 6-8 hours being standard. Jack Spellington (pseudonym), the creator, was of the opinion that the game worked best with 15 players across 3 tables. Each table's players tried to advance their civilization's cause in a set of mini-adventures. There was opportunity for alliances with other tables, and even characters shifting from one table to another as part of an alliance or through treachery. The game required a LOT of GM prep, especially when it came to keeping the tables in sync temporally.

Characters were kept simple: Body, Mind, and Charisma scores, percentile roll-under. Percentile skills in 12 different areas, starting at base stat -50% and going up to +50%. This simplicity is good, because every damn thing in the game added on top of those. You had weapons, armor, land vehicles, spaceships, bionics, symbionts, and more, all with their own 3 stats (except symbionts, which had 2 but also 6 new skills). It was good having unified mechanics. Some things really did call out for their own subsystems rather than getting squished into percentile roll-under.

Space Rampage was inspired by a much earlier game: Spaceward Ho! (the exclamation point is obligatory), which came out in 1990. SH! is a 4x game from before the term "4x" became common. You build ships, send them out to establish colonies where you build more ships, and eventually fight your rival civilizations. SH! has a lot of things I really like, and apparently I'm not alone - it's in the Macworld Games Hall of Fame. Space Rampage started development in 1991, but Master of Orion came out on Mac in 1995 and that resulted in some heavy revisions and major additions. SR was run at gaming conventions across the Chicago area about 2-3 times a year, plus a monthly playtest group.

There's no art in Space Rampage unless you really, really like data tables. The game never made it out of the three-ring binder format, but the ones I've seen do say "version 1.1", so Jack apparently considered it the finished version.

[fantasyfantasygames]

Trenchers

Trenchers, Games Stacked Three High, 2021

No relation to the Keith Giffen Trencher comic.

You are goblins running a trenchcoat factory. The dastardly kobolds are trying to get into your factory and steal your trenchcoats. It's a narrowly-focused 20-page game with enough breathing room that it doesn't feel like you're just playing a "board game with talking".

The rules in Trencher lean heavily on broad interpretation of the core stats: Height, Reach, Warts, Claws, Scars, and Hyperfixation. You may notice that almost all of these are physical. The game encourages you to use Scars both for toughness and for caution, Claws for both attack and careful dexterity, etc. Each of you is part of a different workers' union, in a move very similar to Paranoia's secret societies but (slightly) more cooperative. Trencher also has a "goblin mode" rule that sends your character into weird, short, nearly-productive sidequests if they accumulate too much stress, which is the closest equivalent to HP.All of the example setups revolve around the factory specifically: Kobolds invading your factory, or finding replacement parts, or striking for better wages, etc.

There are several references in Trenchers to the more-well-known Kobolds Ate My Baby. King Torg is name-dropped. You might be able to run Trenchers as a side-story to KAMB, if KAMB were ever intended for long-term play. The art in Trenchers is of similar quality to KAMB but with a darker style. For the Goblin vs. Kobold scenes they draw the Kobolds in a near-exact parody of KAMB. I'm a sucker for combining two art styles in one piece.

There are stats for Kobolds, Cloakers (the D&D monster), Mothman (who wants to eat your fabric). The game does have a short section on rules for actually running a trenchcoat factory, which I think might actually be a parody of a first-year economics textbook. I'm not sure. I never took econ.